Criminal: June 2009 Archives

Michael Burton, 48, claims he was acting in self-defense when he stabbed Otilia Burton, his wife of 13 years, on July 16, 2007.  The expert's testimony likely dealt another setback to the defense strategy for Michael Burton, a former Pasadena firefighter who prosecutors accuse of murdering his wife before trying to take his own life. During the samurai sword attack that killed Otilia Burton, she suffered some of her wounds while she was sitting or lying down on the floor of her home, a prosecution expert testified Monday in West Valley Superior Court.

Randolph Beasley, a crime scene expert for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, testified for nearly four hours Monday about the blood spatters he analyzed in the Burtons' Rancho Cucamonga home following the incident. The expert's testimony - consisting of detailed analysis of blood and other evidence found in the Burtons' home - took up the entire day of Monday's proceedings, the sixth day of testimony in Burton's murder trial.

Excerpted from DailyBulletin.com.

Alcohol testing expert Paul L. Glover testified Tuesday that Charla Davis' blood-alcohol level may have been twice the driving limit when she smashed into a vehicle's door and ran down three people last August.  The expert, head of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services' alcohol testing branch, projected Davis had a blood-alcohol level of 0.18 or greater at the time of the hit-and-run wreck on a Belmont, NC, bridge. Tractor-trailer driver Ronnie Gene Eudy, 40, who had stopped to help an ailing motorist, was killed, and two others were injured.  GastonGazette.com reports:

Glover used a process known as retrograde extrapolation to estimate Davis' alcohol concentration. Belmont Police Lt. Richard Spry testified that he smelled alcohol on Davis' breath when she arrived at the police station for an interview at 10:14 a.m. the morning after the wreck.